As if our Passion menu – featuring almost 100 different smoothies, juices, protein shakes, elixirs and milkshakes – was not enough, we know that you also like to eat your fruit with a spoon, and thus a few new fruity breakfast concoctions have been created just for you!

We originally started doing Passion smoothie protein bowls to encourage our gym bunnies at Passion Café in BFit be more adventurous with their protein shakes – instead of sticking to the ‘highly exciting’ Banana Leche protein shake.

Now skipping the whey protein and blending process, our new smoothie bowls are just pure fruit with the occasional addition of nut butter or even a few spinach leaves. They are much more suitable for hard core vegans and those who just don’t ‘agree’ with whey.

Also very popular is the breakfast smoothie bowl at Passion Marina, a lovely concoction of frozen banana, berries and coconut.

We have done a new twist on our açai bowls, blending açai with more exotic fruit than just a banana and topping it with our amazing raw granola, making the whole experience totally vegan and gluten free with the added benefits of good fats coming from nuts. Just yummy!

To make things more interesting for our regular customers who just love fruit for their breakfast, our chunky fruit soup is just lush. Freshly cut fruit resting in an orange and almond ‘broth’ topped with walnuts and hemp will make anyone thrive all day long. This bowl is natural all the way with the ideal combo of good fruit sugars and good fats from nuts and hemp.

The reason I could never be a raw foodist is winter. Warming things just slightly or adding lots of spice to my food and drink to make them more ‘warming’ for my system is not something I have ever warmed up to.

The Croatian in me loves hot things which you can eat with a spoon, but without slurping (Eastern Europeans love to slurp!) and raising my body temperature when those winter chills kick in.

Luckily in Ibiza we do not have a very cold winter period but man, when it is cold, it is cold! The majority of houses and apartments are not equipped with heating systems to keep us pleasantly warm when it is oh-so-cold outside. My air conditioning unit at home is ok. I switch it on and it is super hot within minutes. But when I switch it off it gets cold again in minutes – even before you can say minestrone.

So at my home and in my Passions I make sure that hot stuff is on hand! I have an impressive selection of teas (I love my Teapigs!), but I also love making my own tea from herbs, roots, citrus and spices. Recently, one of my favourite teas has been rose tea, which I’m so proud we will be serving in all Passions. Just a few rose buds, add hot water and voila!

By now maybe you have noticed that I’m huge fan of orange blossom, rose water, dates, halva, and other middle eastern inspired ingredients. I am quite simply obsessed with the flavors, textures, and exotic ingredients of the orient.

But, back to winter warmers..!

Our customers love to keep warm, as shown by the endless chai teas and chai lattes we have been selling in Passion, along with hot turmeric tonics, matcha teas and lattes, gojichinnos, lemon, honey and ginger teas, and my absolute winter favourite hot apple juice with cinnamon (it’s just like drinking apple pie!)

We have been having lots of fun in our new Passion Pantry with the creation of our deli plate and the soups that go with it. Every day we come up with a new concoction. Day one – red lentil and pumpkin, day two – cauliflower, curry and coconut, day three – creamy peas soup or simply a chunky mixed veggie soup with chickpeas and day four – one of my favourites which is fennel and oat milk soup. We make a mean kale stew too. All so inspiring and so very good!

As far as I am concerned, winters are for soups and I could live on them. We normally make a huge pot and you can see me going back to the kitchen every couple of hours or so, picking up the bowl and loading up a ladle or two for yet another bowl.

As I don’t cook at home, I have been eating in my restaurants constantly for three years now. Our homemade winter soups are feeling really good as we are not so busy in the winter months and I can eat in peace and really savour the flavours. You may say lucky me, eating in Passion all day long, and I do agree. We have superbly fresh food from high integrity ingredients but I hardly ever eat in peace as my mouthfuls are interrupted by people talking to me, answering e-mails, all while swallowing my broccoli without chewing it!

Sometimes I push my plate away half way through my meal, fed up with chewing because I have so many things to do! I’m serious. I get bored eating and chewing… so much for people thinking I must be a real gourmand. Not at all! I eat because I have to, but I like to create food so this is all it matters, I create, you eat! I hope we have good deal 😉

Wishing you lots of nice hot stuff, warm socks and fluffy snoring dogs (or another form of human hot water bottle) in those long dark winter nights.

Well, well, well…our deli plate of the day at our newly opened Passion Pantry is proving super popular already! It’s not the easiest thing to make people try it as they are tempted by walking over to their beloved Passion Marina, but once they do… it is love at the first sight (and bite!).

Our deli plate contains a plethora of goodness, vibrant colors, textures and flavors, all on one plate. Start with creamy pumpkin, lentil and coconut soup to get your appetite going, warming you up on those cold Ibiza days. Follow this with mouthfuls of quinoa flavoured with chopped up oven roasted root veggies, parsley, toasted almonds and a light dressing. Next try the edamame hummus and our homemade socca chickpea bread (gluten free of course!), chili and coriander aubergine, courgette fritter, sautéed red cabbage with walnuts and raisins.

With a choice of vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian (meaning some fish) options, the deli plate is ideal for everyone. And just so you will never get bored, the plate is constantly changing. Think beautifully marinated tofu steak, grilled goat cheese, or a green thai curry salmon burger to complete your meal. Our daily plate is inspired by veggies of the season and items in our bio shop – expect stuffed organic pita bread with sweet potato burger and black bean hummus, or soba noodles with cashews, mango, coriander and soft aubergine (Lana’s favorite dish!), tandoori tofu bites with coconut quinoa… list goes on!

When Miss Love is creating menu and recipes, expect nothing but variety, someone open Lana her own Harrods food hall, por favor! Our favourite moment is when she storms in the kitchen and in one breath explains six recipes in her ridiculously rapid English, that sometimes even she struggles to understand! Imagine the frustration of our Spanish staff trying to understand that there is no enough chopped up parsley, that the aubergine is not cooked to perfection, or that there’s too much garlic in hummus! But at Passion we don’t stress, we are just passionate about doing everything well.

Lana has an innate ability to fix what anyone else would find unfixable. She often repeats a sentence she learned in her acting classes – which were centuries ago, but don’t tell her we told you that! – ‘When I’m in a creative state of mind there is no such thing as a distraction, only potential inspiration’. So now you know why every time Lana makes power balls they never taste the same! And while Lana is in the Passion Pantry, until summer woos her to other Passionate locations, you can expect the unexpected on your deli plates!

One of the new creations of Miss I Make The Best Porridge Ever (which we have to agree is so far true or we haven’t tried any better, yet), is our new Threesome porridge. An absolutely delicious blend of oats, quinoa and chia in nut milk and topped with cinnamon poached pear and apple, almond butter, whipped coconut cream, toasted almonds and maple syrup. A must try!

Come and visit us on our new corner! Passion Pantry is so cute, people go wow when they walk in and their eyes turns into little hearts! We love to create, innovate, cook, chop and blend. All you need to do is eat!

The first time I tried raw food was actually in Ibiza, believe it or not!

Those of you who have been in Ibiza for a few years might remember a little deli on the roadside next to Bambuddha Grove. I loved that place. I still miss it! There was a sweet couple running it and I have to thank them for allowing me to eating raw courgette pasta and trying raw wraps for the first time in my life. I spent a lot of time there drinking my acai smoothies and absorbing the whole super natural atmosphere and the food alchemy that was so new to me. I remember seeing them spreading orange paste so thinly onto plastic sheets (they were making carrot wraps), totally bewildered. I was like, whaaaat? How do you do that? What’s in it?

I used to go there often with my boyfriend at the time, who was only happy to accompany me, but every time upon leaving the place he would put his arm around my shoulders and sweetly ask me, “OK, that was nice, but where are we going for a lunch now?” The meat and potato Portugeezer didn’t even consider this type of food as a starter but more like an appetizer! Lots of guys still look at raw food as such. My brothers are first in line to laugh at the whole concept. You can go and influence and inspire thousands of people you don’t even know to change or upgrade their diets, but you may not ever succeed with your own family. And this is my true story to this day. My brothers are laughing at my business of ‘selling grass’ – that’s their way of looking at Passion salads.

Afterwards, the restaurant Parawdiso opened in Santa Gertrudis (not to the amusement of my ‘handsome-gym-going-carrots-don’t-give-you-muscles’ Portugeezer). It was here that I discovered raw desserts. Even though their raw carrot cake hardly matched the Passion carrot cake, it was ‘interesting’ to me. I looked on in horror at the already pre-juiced concoctions in the jugs, thinking, ‘they pre juice! Ugrh’! But I was kindly informed those juices were juiced using a slow extracting juice machine that kept all their nutrients intact. Hmm, I did not buy that instantly, but I was totally clueless at the time about the whole concept. And so the (raw) Pandora box was opened for Lana Love…

I was intrigued, I wanted to know more, I liked the concept, I liked nut balls! I decided to go on a raw diet as back in those days my diet of coffee and croissants was getting out of control. I was so ‘sorry’ to bin any unsold croissants at Passion at the end of each day, I though it made sense for me to eat them all. Oh my dear God! Imagine!

So, the nice people in Parawdiso were supplying me with their awesome onion bread, raw crepes and those nut balls. I did not even attempt to try and make anything myself in those days, it was just too alien to me and the whole ritual of driving to Santa Gerturdis from Playa d’en Bossa and picking up my raw goodies was awesome. I started losing weight like crazy. It was almost like one kilogram a day! It was a great change and new outlook on the way I was eating. And the rest is history… I discovered David Wolfe, I discovered superfoods, I discovered raw food recipes and voila! Now I make raw food free handedly without even following recipes anymore. Nut balls are now the famous Passion power balls… don’t you just love them?

I have never been a raw foodist, I love oven-roasted veggies and sweet potato mash way too much, but I do love having as much as raw food possible in my diet: fresh, simple, without too much seasoning, vibrant and colourful.